Continue the Magento POS review, today we will look at Magestore POS vs ConnectPOS.
If you have one or many brick-and-mortar stores and need to connect them to Magento for better management (orders, sales, customers, inventory, etc.), what you’re finding is a Magento-based POS.
There are many Magento POS extensions in the market (you can check out some at Magento Marketplace) and you may feel overwhelmed a bit. We want to give you a hand with this Magento POS comparison series, in which we review and compare the most popular ones.
Magento POS Review: Things in Common
Magento. The two Point-of-Sale extensions work with Magento 1 and Magento 2.
A small note is that ConnectPOS is compatible with Magento 1.8 and above, Magento 2.1 and above for both Community and Enterprise Editions
Device. Both have two app versions: web app and native iPad app, and can work with many different POS hardware peripherals, including barcode scanners, card readers, receipt printers and cash drawers.
Magento POS basic features. Like other Point of Sale extensions in the current market, Magestore POS and ConnectPOS have the basic features that cover day-to-day tasks of shop operators and owners:
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- Products & Inventory: shared catalogue and stock with Magento, manage inventory at different stores (available in web app and iPad app of ConnectPOS and web app of Magestore POS)
- Checkout: add notes to orders, add shipment, add Custom Sale (add a new product that is not available in Magento to cart), print and email receipts, subscribe to newsletters
- Payments: integrated and non-integrated payments available, Split Tenders (accept multi payments in one order) and Layaway (make a deposit)
- Customers: synchronized customer database with Magento, including existing customers and newly added customers from POS or online
- Offline Mode: continue selling when the Internet’s down
- Integrations: integrated with Reward Points, Gift Cards and Multi-warehouse Inventory extensions
- Management: users (create new users and assign roles and permissions to them), stores and registers, shifts (open and close shifts, X-Report and Z-Report)
Magento POS Review: Differences
Speed. Magestore POS’ working speed depends heavily on Magento, which ConnectPOS communicates with Magento via an API (a connector) so it can perform fast without being affected by Magento’s speed.
Checkout. The checkout process of ConnectPOS is quicker and smoother than Magestore POS because ConnectPOS has Quick Cash suggestion and calculates the order values with taxes and promotions locally. This means ConnectPOS will still calculate accurately in Offline Mode.
In Magestore POS, you can handle multiple orders at the same time so in case a customer leaves to pick more items in the middle of checkout process, you can check out for the next guest.
In ConnectPOS, if the same case happens, you can save the current cart to retrieve it later and move on to the next customer.
Payments. In terms of integrated payments, apart from PayPal Here and Authorize.Net, Magestore POS offers Pay.nl, Stripe, and Bambora while ConnectPOS has iZettle and Tyro. Non-integrated payments are available in both.
Refund and Exchange. You can refund to Reward Points or Gift Cards in ConnectPOS or Reward Points and Store Credit in Magestore POS.
ConnectPOS also supports exchange on the original order: you choose the refunded item and add the new item for exchange to cart. A new order will be automatically created for the new item with a note mentioning the original order number for tracking.
Omnichannel Features. ConnectPOS has an obvious advantage here as it maintains a fully-synchronized database between Magento and POS all the time while you have to sync manually in Magestore POS.
These omnichannel features available in ConnectPOS include Click-and-collect/ In-store Pickup, Endless Aisle, Multishipping, Send Cart to Wishlist and vice versa. It even has Sales Assistant Mode that provides recommendations to help cashiers assist their customers better.
Customer Management. Magestore POS has a separate section for managing customers, while ConnectPOS integrates this part with Order List so you can look up a specific customer with his basic information, lifetime value, reward point balance, and orders.
Store operations. ConnectPOS enables pin code login for quick access and auto log out after POS is idle for a certain amount of time (i.e. 15 minutes) to keep it secured.
With ConnectPOS, you can attribute an order to a specific salesperson to calculate commission. Translation tool and receipt customization are also available in ConnectPOS.
Reports. Both offer X-Report (Mid day Report) and Z-Report (End of day Report), but ConnectPOS takes one step further with its own Report module.
ConnectPOS Report module has 20 types of basic and advanced reports that can be filtered and compared by date range. You can customize the reports and export them to share with your accountants.
Final Words
Both Magestore POS and ConnectPOS are strong Magento POS systems in the current market. If you own multi-store and really want to offer an omnichannel shopping experience for customers, consider ConnectPOS as they have many omnichannel features ready and on the way.
You can register for a demo and free trial of ConnectPOS on their website.